Heartland by Anthony Cartwright

that made drinks coolers for pubs he sorted screws into plastic cartons. In a warehouse of flat-packed furniture he spent a day wrapping pallets laden with boxes of chocolate incling-film. This, combined with the fact that he’d only be there for a few days at most, gave him a sense of separation that suited him. It was an odd time, then. He’d spent the year catching two buses to the old grammar school sixth-form in Stourbridge where the brightest students went, a handful of clever Asian kids all getting the same bus at Dudley bus station. A Sikh lad from Himley Road he sometimes sat with had come up with a collective nickname for them – the Tokens.
    Early that summer Rob had seen him at the bus-stop, pulled in to give him a lift in the little car he was obviously so proud of. He’d got through his first year at the Villa; over the loud dance music on the car stereo he told him a story about how skilful Dwight Yorke was, about going for a drink with some of the first team at the Belfry on a Monday night, full of himself. He was about to go off on holiday to Crete with Karen Woodhouse. There was a small picture of her stuck to the sunvisor on the driver’s side, her head back laughing in the sunshine, holding a bottle of beer halfway to her lips, her spare hand waving as if to stop the photo being taken, its shadow merging with the photographer’s as it fell across her brown legs.
    When he got out of the car and Rob pulled away he’d stood on the pavement for a while, thinking about the photo, his clothes prickling on him in the sun’s warmth. He remembered a few years earlier when he and Rob had sneaked up the cinema fire exit to watch
Back to the Future
three times in a row. In the film, characters would start to fade from photographs if someone interfered with the past. That was what he felt like now, like he was fading away. He looked at his watery shadow on the pavement. In one of Zubair’s history books he’d read how shadows in Hiroshima were burned into the ground, the people who’d cast them blasted into nothing.
    Adnan sat apart in work canteens, far enough away tobe separate, close enough to torture himself with the mocking or aggressive looks he got from boys his own age or men as old as his dad.
    Wheer yow from, mate?
    Dudley. Cinderheath.
    No, wheer’m yer originally from?
    Me family’s from Pakistan. Well, Kashmir, I spose. He pictured his mum mouthing counting games and stories of the mountains in Pahari to Tayub.
    Why doh yer fuck off back theer then?
    That was a conversation with a bloke with an Elvis quiff driving a fork-lift at a place in Tipton. Usually things were a bit more subtle. If there were women at a place there was more conversation.
    Ay it strange for yer, working here, like. Wouldn’t it be better with yer own kind?
    Dyer like curry, Adnan? I love it, I dun. We have a Chicken Tikka Masala every Friday.
    He is good lookin, ay he, this un. Like that cricketer, whossisnaeme, Imran Khan. They send us some lovely-lookin lads from up Dudley, doh they?
    He didn’t know why he was doing it, what he was looking for. There was other work, office stuff, data entry, where things wouldn’t have been such a battle, easier work too, but he always turned that down. He had other money coming in as well. He’d sold a couple of little programs he’d sent to a games magazine, adjustments and cheats for a simulation game where you played God and built a world from scratch. Most of the time he just felt he was waiting for something.
    He got a day in a warehouse over the back from his dad’s place. He spent the morning loading boxes of hinges into a van. The people who’d bought the site were saving stock before they pulled the factory building down. There were people working on a last order as the place gotpulled apart around them. At dinnertime he stood in the queue at the sandwich van and could see right across the yards into his